Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Visualising the metaverse of the future

It’s that time of year again where we put aside momentarily our
grumbles about lag, TPV clauses and the whimsy of online relationships and pat
Second Life® on the back once more for incrementing its existence by another
year. Yes, SL is nine; one more year to go to the almighty decade, provided a
Mayan prophesy doesn’t come along between now and then and ruin things for
everybody.Bloody Mayans.They clearly had far too much time on their
hands.

Assuming, then, that we do indeed make it to this momentous
occasion, the likelihood is that the blogosphere will use the moment to make a
few prophecies of its own.What will SL
be like on its twentieth birthday?Will
there be a twentieth birthday?I’ve decided to jump the gun on everyone and
begin that speculation now.After all,
if the blogosphere is right, there might not even be a tenth birthday, and that would be an opportunity for carefree,
utterly-without-evidence speculation lost.

In fact, I’m going to ignore SL completely in my 2023
visualisation.Let’s just say, “What
might the metaverse look like on SL’s twentieth anniversary?”Whether or not SL is going to still be around
to fill that role by then, I confess I have absolutely no idea.But I do
believe (Mayan prophecies and other non-branded end-of-world predictions aside)
there will be a metaverse of some description around at that time.I can’t actually imagine how it could be
otherwise.Online 3D gaming is
enormous.Social networking is
enormous.The desire to exist beyond
that which physically surrounds us is as great as it’s ever been.It really is only a matter of time before
these things converge on a large scale, and if SL hasn’t captured so far – and
doesn’t ultimately end up capturing – a mass market on the concept, I suspect
this will only be viewed in retrospect as an attempt at an idea that failed
because it was just too ahead of its time and didn’t quite get the finer details right.A bit like the Sinclair C5.

So the 2023 metaverse I’m imagining is immensely
popular.Gone are the days of snickering
at the guy who let it slip he had an avatar in ‘Second Life’ and residents no
longer have to fight the desire to respond to such poorly concealed mirth by
smashing people’s faces in.It’s now
pretty much accepted, in fact, that metaverse activity and trade is the new direction
for online time – much as Facebook is accepted today – and the only poorly
concealed smirks to be found are those of the smug, old-timer metaversians
privately giving each other gleeful high-fives each time a real life work
colleague asks discreetly for tips on managing inventory or cybersex technique.

How has this been achieved?Improvements in technology have, of course, helped.That all-important ‘first hour’ is now smooth
and slick and satisfactory.Super-fast
broadband speeds of 100Mb or more have reduced lag to hardly noticeable in all
but the most crowded of regions.Large
screen displays offering life-size avatars; photo-realistic environments,
simulated down to the smallest blade of grass; cameras that watch your real
life body for movements that can be mapped onto your avatar: all these things
make immersion more complete and more immediate than it’s ever been
before.3D immersion glasses also have a
following, but the tabloids have had a field day with research linking them to
headaches and occasional epileptic seizures.

It’s not at all the technology that’s had the biggest impact
on mass take-up, however: the metaverse’s redesign is acknowledged as being
largely responsible for that.In the
end, all it took was for someone to look at successful social media and
actually apply what had been learned there to what had been learned in virtual
worlds like SL.For example, there were
certain things that most new Facebook users ‘got’, even before they’d logged on
to the network for the very first time; the most powerful of these was the
understanding that everyone on Facebook had their own space where you could
find out things about them.In the 2D
world of the web this space was understood to be a web page.In the 3D world of the metaverse, therefore,
it was realised that the intuitive expectation had to be that this space would
be a room or a building or a garden or some
sort ofthree dimensional place
that represented in some customisable way the person it belonged to.In the new, successful, metaverse, then, signup
takes you straight to your very own place.For free.The notion that having
any sort of a home is a luxury residents should pay for has been identified as
an unworkable business model; instead, everyone gets a free place of a certain
size and money is required to make it bigger.You start off with a default house and small garden that you can
customise to your heart’s content and if you want a bigger area, then you
pay.Simple.And if you want your own space to be
something promotional whilst you rent to actually live in someone else’s space
(or have residences in a number of different spaces) then that is just fine
too.

It’s no longer a single cyber-world, then, as SL was.But SL was never really a single world in any case.Few people actually walked or flew from region to region in the days of
SL; teleportation was, of course, the norm – and, in the case of private sims,
essential.Naturally, you can still
teleport from place to place in metaverse 2023 – let’s call it ‘Huckverse’ for
future retrospective patenting purposes – it’s just that the old pretence of a
single world has been dropped.If you
have the money, you can extend your own space into an entire planet if you want
to, or you can link your space to the spaces of your friends and make one up
between you.Linking spaces, in 2023,
has become the modern day equivalent of friending.

Did I mention that all these spaces are accessed via a web
page?Of course they are; why would
anyone in their right mind ignore the number one infrastructure in use for
accessing the internet (why indeed; why indeed)?

The knowledgeable amongst you might just be thinking right
now that the metaverse described thus far isn’t an entirely new concept.Google, in fact, tried something not
completely dissimilar back in 2008 with its Lively
experiment.Announcing the product in
July 2008, Google manager, Niniane Wang said of it:

“If you enter a Lively
room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense
of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and
environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by
customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to
say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact
through animated actions.”

But Google Lively lasted for just six months.Because what it was was an attempt to apply
that which made social networking successful to a 3D environment which
completely ignored that which made virtual worlds successful.What seems to be ignored by the
ever-searching eye of IT hunger is that Second Life is a successful venture.Where it hasn’t succeeded so far is in achieving mass-appeal, but where
it has succeeded – and spectacularly
– is in the retention and creativity of residents who do become immersed in
it.Once you get past those first few
awkward hours that are such a turn-off to so many, the time and talent invested
by residents in SL becomes very considerable.Any serious strategic consideration of a mass-appeal metaverse,
therefore, has to consider not just what makes people sign up in the first
place, but the things that make them want to stay once they’re in.Google Lively was just a 3D chat-room with a
few frills – not massively different from Microsoft’s ‘Comic Chat’ in 1996 (also
discontinued).Customisation of your
room and avatar was extremely limited and making new content was nothing like
as easy or as comprehensive as it is in SL.There was very little sense of immersion.The graphical look was very cartoonish.Navigation controls were fiddly and
non-intuitive.Basically, it sucked.

Huckverse, then, will combine social networking expectations
with all those features we know and love in SL – and just know that others
would love if they ever gave SL a proper chance.User content creation will form the basis of
a thriving online economy (an economy which, incidentally, is not limited to
the metaverse alone – you’ll be able to spend your Lindens earned on Amazon or
iTunes, for example) and more tightly interlinked with real life products
(clothing manufacture, for example, will adopt the principles of current
print-on-demand technology, enabling people to design clothes for avatars which
can also be bought in the real world).Inworld events and experiences will be regarded as real and tangible and
worthwhile pursuits.Online
relationships will be attended to by some as the biggest threat there’s ever
been to conventional life and by others as the beginning of a new understanding
of human interaction and love (although psychologists probably won’t get around
to studying it seriously until about 2053).And so on.

My dearest hope is that Metaverse 2023 will in fact be SL.On that issue, we shall just have to wait and
see if Linden’s imagination and courage is up to the task.For the moment, however, such fancies can be
put aside.Nine years is quite an
achievement, regardless.Happy Birthday,
Second Life.